I found a little niggle in WordPress when creating a custom form using shortcodes and plain PHP/HTML for processing. Turns out if your form uses $_POST[‘name’] in your form, WP does not like that and serves a Not Found (404) page. Changing that input field name to a different one, say surname, fixed the problem immediately. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure that out!

I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to play and experiment with syntax highlighting plugins for any code I’d like to post on here and other blogs. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of options to choose from and many just aren’t up to scratch.

What’s worse is that some have funny syntaxes such as using <pre class=”language”> tags which are easily broken by the wordpress WYSIWYG editor and your code gets mangled. Not only that, but changing over to a better plugin becomes a tedious task if you have to change all those pre tags to shorttags.

I’d like to recommend a plugin which works very well, called SyntaxHighliter Plus by Fred Wu and other contributors. In my opinion, it’s one of the easier plugins to use and makes posting code a breeze.

Update: As of BuddyPress 1.1 this can be done via the wordpress aministration area. You can find this in BuddyPress > General Settings on the left side menu.

Those that use BuddyPress along with their WordPress MU installation may have found some limitations with the xprofiles. BuddyPress Devs have improvements listed as an upcoming feature, but in the meantime some things need to be fixed NOW!

One particular feature I needed to get round was the fact that you can’t change the default “Name” field. Whilst very common to have this as a field in most installations, we should at least be able to edit the field names the user sees, but unfortunately this is not so.